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Mercury Contamination Vs. Energy-Efficient Lightbulbs
phyrebyrd writes "How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent lightbulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labor — unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health."
This is an urban legend propagated by conservative propaganda sites. Good thing we have editors to filter this stuff out for us...
c hange_light/downloads/Fact_Sheet_Mercury.pdf
There is very little mercury in CFLs, you are in more danger of getting cut by the glass than you are of getting mercury poisoning.
http://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/promotions/
I switched my house to CFLs and started saving $15-20 per month. If everyone did this then the big power companies would see a dent in their bottom line and so they start spreading lies like this.
We have the best government that money can buy.
The High Quality CFL's produced today have amalgam filling that prevents this. Also studies have found that a standard Incandescent bulb puts 10 times as much mercury into the environment because of coal power consumption.
The permitted mercury content of tuna in Canada is 0.5 part per million, so a 170-gram tin contains at most 85 micrograms of the stuff, about a factor sixty less than the lightbulb.
I think this is more a story about how good we are at detecting minuscule quantities of material, and how political requirements tend to be of the form that the allowable amount of a dangerous material should be a small multiple of the detection limit; I would wager that the health damage caused by the stress of being told to find two thousand dollars to decontaminate your living room is significantly greater than any that could possibly be caused by five milligrams of mercury vapour.
From http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Steve_M illoy
Steven J. Milloy is a columnist for Fox News and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil and other corporations. From the 1990s until the end of 2005, he was an adjunct scholar at the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.
One large grain of salt coming right up
Despite the moderators who think that this is informative, it's false. According to http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~frf/sea-mehg.html, canned albacore tuna has a mercury concentration of about 0.353 ppm. The "canned, light" tuna is listed as being about a third of that, but I'll go with the higher number to give you the benefit of the doubt. Working it out, that means that 170 grams of canned tuna has about 60 micrograms of mercury. That is about 1.2% as much as the 5 milligrams of mercury in a typical CF bulb -- nowhere close to 50%
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I went to an art-show/Earth Day event a couple blocks from my house Saturday (yes, our town has it a week late). They had representatives of various environmental and recycling organizations.
The sign-in sheet had a place to check a box "pledging" to convert one incandescent lamp to flourescent. So I asked about where to return them when they die. After all, safe and convenient disposal is a critical component of encouraging their use.
Man, you would have thought I was watching roaches scurry when the light came on.
Dump them in the trash? No! - that's illegal dumping of toxic waste.
Save them and take them to the thrice-yearly e-waste event? No! - they are specifically prohibited.
Take them to the recycling center a couple blocks from my house? No! - "We're supposed to be self-supporting and the permit cost would bankrupt us."
Pretty much the only option provided was to wait for the "convenient" once-a-month Saturday the waste facility is open, put the burned-out bulb in my car, drive a half-dozen miles to the waste facility (they were helpful in telling me how to get to the facility while dodging the most dangerous parts of Richmond), wait in line (start/stop engine repeatedly or idle constantly), fill out paperwork, hand them the bulb, drive a half-dozen miles back home.
If that's the best the powers-that-be can come up with, they shouldn't be surprised that CFL adoption is less than they hoped. With cans, bottles and electronics they tack on a recycling fee up-front. And any store that sells ni-cads is required to accept them for recycling. Seems like a couple ideas that should be considered for flourescents.
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"You are not remembered for doing what is expected of you." - Atul Chitnis
Yeah, scare-mongering over mercury is pretty common. I remember when I was a kid I used to break open those little glass-tubes from old thermostats and collect the mercury. Safe? Eh, probably not, but I'm still alive and I don't have mercury poisoning. After all, elemental mercury isn't really the dangerous one anyway, it's organic mercury that's really dangerous, like good 'ol dimethylmercury which even a tiny amount will pass right through a pair of rubber gloves and kill you. Elemental mercury? Mercury vapor accumulating is probably the biggest risk, but I can't imagine the tiny amounts in a CFL being that big of a deal. It sounds like from the article that they had found high levels of mercury vapor, though I still question whether a single CFL bulb is enough to cause the amount of contamination the story claims.
If you don't want someone to copy something, don't give it to anyone.
"I find this scare-mongering over mercury to be amusing. "
As do I. Why would you HAZMAT a room for 5mg of mercury vapour that will float out the window?
When you break a thermometer:
http://tinyurl.com/2eevmp
or when you break an old school (10mg/HG) tube:
http://tinyurl.com/ytwmqu
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
It's just you.
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Popular Mechanics tested a bunch of CFL bulbs against incandescents, and the CFLs scored higher than the incandescents.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/home_journal/home
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Here you go!
http://www.ilumisys.com/index.html
Ive seen this circulating the blog already, and did a little investigating. Turns out some aspects of this story are less then credible.
Lets start with the source of the article, one Steven Milloy - you can see his name is on that particular version of it, as well as some others. A quick background check, placing his name into google, reveals that Steven Milloy is a quite enthusiastic campagigner against climate-change reducing initiatives - ironicly, he labels it 'junk science' - as well as opposed to environmental concerns in general. His wikipedia page goes into more detail. He also runs junkscience.com - just your plain old astroturf site, that will label any part of science junk for a suitable fee. And yes, I checked its the same Stephen Milloy. The attribution at the end of the article confirms it.
I could spend a lot of time going into Milloy's record as a producer of scientific articles ranging from dubious to outright false, but lets not get distracted into the ad-homs here. Instead, how about a look at the criticism of the CFL scare from denialism.com - as the site points out, the level of mercury in a CFL is tiny - 5mg. Not to mention that CFL is just a new packageing for an old technology - the older tube-lights run on exactly the same princible and have been in use for a long time now. Have there been any major safety concerns about those? They contain much more mercury than a CFL, due simply to their larger volume. Thermometers contain a whole lot more than either - and who finds that they need to call in the hazmat squad if they break a thermometer?
The $2000 cleanup incident seems to be just an overreaction - an extreme case of 'better safe than sorry.' Or, this being america, perhaps 'better safe than liable.'
You would think but you would be wrong.
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You see a landfill gets many things dumped into them that should not be. The major problem with this is that many of these chemicals end up reacting with mercury which causes more problems then most people realize, please see some of the URL's below as to why you are mistaken in assuming that mercury is a noble gas. On top of this you also have the problem that it appears bacteria found in landfills are able to convert mercury into the much deadlier form of methylated mercury which is again bad.
http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20010707/fob1
http://pubs.acs.org/subscribe/journals/esthag-w/2
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/people/lindberg/lindberg3
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb4814/is_2
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
Mercury spills happen infrequently across the country in university chemistry labs. Typically zinc or sulfur powder is used which binds mercury followed by proper disposal by the university environment, health, and safety department. Many universities are switching to alcohol based thermometers to prevent this.
If you spill mercury I would recommend the following from the Ohio State website:
IMPORTANT NOTES !!! Pregnant women and children should be removed from a spill site and should never be
included in cleanup activities. If a resident has already vacuumed the mercury spill, walked through the spill, or
otherwise extended the spill beyond its initial spill location, disregard the small mercury spills fact sheet and
the mercury cleanup kit document and contact the Ohio EPA's spill hotline at 1-800-282-9378. If a resident have
properly contained the spill, complete the first five steps of the "Small Mercury Spills - What should you do?"
fact sheet. There are mercury spill kits commercially available and convenient. But these kits can be expensive
and are not absolutely necessary to clean up a small, contained mercury spill (such as a fever thermometer or
mercury switch break). The following are some common household items that could be used to construct an
in-home mercury cleanup kit for a small, contained spill:
Rubber gloves
Goggles
Flashlight
Rubber squeegee
Tape (use wide duct, or masking)
Stiff index card
Eye dropper
Syringe without needle
Plastic containers with lids
Wide mouth container
Plastic bags with zipper seal
Plastic sheeting
Trash bags
Tray or box
Powdered sulfur *1
Powdered zinc *2
Powdered sulfur and zinc can be found at garden supply stores or chemical supply houses.
These powders do not prevent mercury vapors, but bind the mercury to the powders for cleanup.
*1- Sulfur powder turns from yellow to brown when it comes in contact with mercury.
*2- Zinc powder amalgamates (bonds with) mercury.
Note: Any item used during a mercury spill cleanup should be double-bagged and disposed of safely. If the
spill was properly contained and cleaned, environmental air testing may not be necessary for spills as small as
a broken fever thermometer. However, a person may wish to have their residence tested to ensure safe levels
for re-occupancy.
"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance" -Confucius
As an often times admirer of things American I usually don't like comments that say "You must be American", but I'm afraid I can't avoid it here.
In Europe we've always had much more expensive energy than you guys in the USofA and by consequence we've for many years been keen adopters of money savers like these bulbs.
At the same time we've grown used to separating our waste and disposing of it in a safe way.
In (Continental!) Western Europe landfills are now the exception. Fluorescent bulbs have since many years been labelled as hazardous waste and are collected as such, as a matter of fact a retailer selling them has to provide a return point for recycling.
Like other dubious explanations of your constitution you might feel you have the right to dump anything in a landfill but that does not make it wise.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I'm not sure where you got your numbers from, but LEDs have made some major leaps and bounds in the past few years. CREE claims 50-80 lumens/watt in their production power LEDs http://www.cree.com/products/xlamp.asp, and as high as 100 with experimental designs.
Osram recently announced a 1000 lumen LED (really 6 LED dies packed into one device) that will be sent to market this summer. http://www.physorg.com/news93198212.html
You are supposed to recycle them! Look for a someone who does it in your area.
l
Here are some places to look for more information:
http://www.lightbulbrecycling.com/regulations.htm
http://www.nema.org/lamprecycle/
http://www.scdhec.gov/brap/forms/flo_lamps.pdf
Also, for those of you guessing about how many bulbs there are in circulation:
"The Mercury from on fluorescent bulb can pollute 6000 gallons of water beyond safe levels for drinking"
and
"The Association of Lighting and Mercury Recyclers (ALMR) estimates that at least 400 million mercury lamps are being disposed of annually as part of the municipal solid waste stream and only 20 percent of all mercury lamps are being recycled."
and
"All fluorescent lamps contain mercury. In fact, the standard fluorescent bulb has about 20 milligrams of mercury."
So - that means that about 8,000,000,000 milligrams or 17,637 pounds of mercury is being put into our environment in the United States. Not a trivial matter.
Yep, I've used sulphur powder twice for spills, once in a chem lab and once from a thermometer at home.
Sulphur powder is preferred over zinc for home use. Sulphur is readily purchased from a drugstore, is inexpensive, has no odor when used, is non-staining to clothing/rugs/pets/furniture, and is non-toxic as long as you don't take a match to it.
Whereas zinc powder is (surprise!) flammable.
Make sure you get *powdered* sulphur. It looks like yellow chalk dust. Coarse granules are much less effective for a couple of reasons.
Directions for use (assumes you're dealing with the 5 mg-10 mg mercury of a CFL):
1. Pick up glass first.
2. Sprinkle the dry sulphur powder wherever you think the mercury went. You can use lots, but piles of sulphur powder are overkill.
2. Work it into the area, say by spreading with a disposable cloth. (Careful of glass though!)
3. Wipe it up. Since it's bright yellow, it's easy to see where to clean. Use dry or wet cloth for this. Final clean with vacuum cleaner is optional.
4. Dispose in trash. Sulphur powder is stable and benign to the environment. As others have pointed out, 5 mg mercury in a sulphur amalgam is a low risk.
While mercury does turn dry sulphur a brown color, you don't get enough mercury from a CFL for the brown to be visible to you.